April 2022 Status Update
Why hello there! It’s the first Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for your next installment of starbeam.one monthly status updates.
Everything is on Fire…
Sometimes the expression “on fire” can be a good thing. Most of the times it is not. Currently, the state of this project is in the latter, unfortunately. Every day seems like a new challenge or something else breaking. I am currently attending to each one as the only person on this project at the moment and making due with the resources and limitations presented to me.
… but Still Pushing Forward
I’ve been at this for two years now and it’s been more or less the same sort of chaos. Technically, this is nothing new for me but now it’s in front of a larger audience. To further add to the grief, this was all due to my own decision to make it as such with my February announcement. 😅 Nonetheless, nothing has really changed and it’s business as usual, taking each issue as it arises and dealing with it.
Stand-up & Shine (& Shill)
After going a full month of weekly standups, I am rolling these back to semi-weekly due to their demand on me (or specifically, my time). It’s not just the day of filming, but the few days after that get me. For the month of April, I will be doing only one of these (today) to make up for the churn for the past month.
On the good news (there is good news here somewhere right? 😆) I have picked up 7 subscribers for my YouTube channel. Thank you to each and every one of you for your support!
No One is Talking about the Blockchain
As I mentioned earlier, I could have waited a bit longer to make an announcement and most of the grief thrown onto myself is my own doing. But, along with that comes a few takeaways. One of these is getting early feedback from artists and collectors. And the theme that seems to be emerging here is that: no one is talking about the blockchain.
… artists want to get paid, and patrons want to pay artists.
The bottom (timeless) line here is that artists want to get paid, and patrons want to pay artists. If you do that, then it doesn’t matter how you’ve done it: you’ve won. Everything else is just noise.
In fact, mentioning the blockchain might become a bit of a distraction/liability by pulling in unwanted (“get rich quick”) elements. So, going forward, you might see me reduce any mention of this altogether.
Front Page Adjustments
There was something I was able to get accomplished this past month, and that is the front page, now featuring better product tiles and clearer category types. You can filter on these types as well. Check it out and feel free to continue helping test the system.
Planned Features
Videos
I am currently attempting to implement video asset support, meaning creators can upload videos as an asset for their creations. This has introduced all sorts of problems for me in the past week in particular. However, I have been able to address most of them and should have something together here in the next day or so.
Preview Fields
What’s valuable about videos is that in addition to content, you can use them for marketing material. As such, adding preview fields to products has been mentioned several times as a wanted feature, so I am adding that this next month. With preview fields, you can add additional content that sort of shows off your product without actually showing the actual product. So, for instance, in the case of a 5 minute song, you can also upload a clip of 15-20 seconds. Preview fields can be images, audio, video, or text.
New Creation Workflow
Part of the friction that I am experiencing here is that all of this code is the first of the first code that I wrote two years ago. So it’s dated and could stand to improve. It’s not just the code but the processes as well. Everything basically captures process and business requirements but is difficult to understand unless you are familiar with it and understand the backing conceptual model.
However, it’s difficult to use. There are a lot of steps involved to issue new licenses and it could be made simpler. This is what I will be working on for the remainder of the month. Once that is done, I will be making a new push to start getting users to test out the process further and get to the next phase here.
Whatever that is. 😁
Schedule
Alright, so where are we right now? The way I see things, it’s:
- April: Refactoring/Fires/Video/Preview/Creator workflow
- May: Administration Application/Features
- June: Alpha Announcement?
- July: More Features
More Details
You can find out more with my monthly standup here:
That should do it for this month. Until next time, stay bright. ✨✌